When the crew of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark is making preparations for seeking that impossible creature, we read that “the Boots and the Broker were sharpening a spade”. This action is so outlandish that the editor and commentator Martin Gardner remarks ad locum: “Why in the world were they sharpening a spade?” (Gardner 2006: 44.) The main objective of this article is to answer this question posed by Gardner. To achieve this, we will perform a philological analysis of any possible locus similis throughout Carroll’s works, and we will study all matches we will find in the …